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Kyle MacLachlan Biography

Kyle MacLachlan is an American leading man of stage and screen, known mostly for his offbeat, stylized performances in the TV series Twin Peaks (1989-90) and the film Blue Velvet (1986), both by filmmaker David Lynch. Kyle MacLachlan first got into acting in his Yakima, Washington high school in the late 1970s. He was doing theater work in 1983 when he was discovered in a nationwide search and cast as the hero in Lynch’s film version of the Frank Herbert science fiction classic Dune (1984). MacLachlan is darkly handsome and yet somehow a little unsettling onscreen. His performances in Twin Peaks (as the eccentric and coffee-loving FBI agent Dale Cooper) and Blue Velvet (as a student who finds a human ear in a field and is plunged into a seedy local underworld) gave him a cult following, and he has since carved out an unusual career in TV and movies and then on the live stage. MacLachlan played keyboardist Robby Krieger in Oliver Stone‘s movie The Doors (1991), was in the Hollywood bomb Showgirls (1995) and spent two seasons on TV’s Sex and the City (2002-04). His other films include the under-appreciated thriller The Hidden (1987), the overly silly The Flintstones (1994) and the art house biopic Mao’s Last Dancer (2009). Kyle MacLachlan’s television work includes In Justice (2006), Desperate Housewives (2010) and How I Met Your Mother (2010-11).

Extra credit

Kyle MacLachlan is a partner in a Washington winery, Pursued by Bear, located in Walla Walla. The name is taken from a stage direction in William Shakespeare‘s play The Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”